Principal Investigator(s):University of California-Los Angeles. Graduate School of Education. Higher Education Research Institute; American Council on Education

Summary:

The principal purposes of this national longitudinal study
of the higher education system in the United States are to describe
the characteristics of new college freshmen and to explore the effects
of college on students. For each wave of this survey, each student
completes a questionnaire during freshman orientation or registration
that asks for information on academic skills and preparation, high
school activities and experiences, educational and career plans,
majors and careers, student value... (more info)

The principal purposes of this national longitudinal study
of the higher education system in the United States are to describe
the characteristics of new college freshmen and to explore the effects
of college on students. For each wave of this survey, each student
completes a questionnaire during freshman orientation or registration
that asks for information on academic skills and preparation, high
school activities and experiences, educational and career plans,
majors and careers, student values, and financing college. Other
questions elicit demographic information, including sex, age, parental
education and occupation, household income, race, religious
preference, and state of birth. Specific questions asked of
respondents in the 1972 survey included students' activities during
high school, students' activities during the past year, and students'
and parents' ethnicity.

Dataset(s)

Study Description

Citation

University of California-Los Angeles. Graduate School of Education. Higher Education Research Institute, and American Council on Education. Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) [United States]: Freshman Survey, 1972. ICPSR02402-v1. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2002. http://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR02402.v1

Universe:
All institutions of higher education with entering
freshman classes listed in the fall enrollment files of the Higher
Education General Information Survey/Integrated Postsecondary
Education Data System (HEGIS/IPEDS) data collections.

Data Types:
survey data

Data Collection Notes:

For information on research methodology and
weighting, users should consult specific editions of "The American
Freshman," a report produced annually by the Graduate School of
Education, University of California, Los Angeles. The 1991 edition of
this report provides the following summary: "The institutions
identified as part of the national population are divided into 37
stratification groups based on institutional race (predominantly white
vs. predominantly black), type (two-year college, four-year college,
university), control (public, private nonsectarian, Roman Catholic and
Protestant) and, for four-year colleges and universities, the
selectivity level of the institution (for two-year colleges,
enrollment is used in place of selectivity). Selectivity, defined as
the average composite SAT score of the entering class, was made an
integral part of the stratification design in 1968, and was revised
and updated in 1975. Those institutions identified as being part of
the Norms [national] sample are then weighted by a two-step
procedure. In the first step, the counts of male and female FTFT
[first-time full-time] population for each institution are divided by
that institution's male and female FTFT respondent count. The
resulting weights, when applied, bring the male and female respondent
counts up to the corresponding counts for the population of that
institution. The weighted counts for all participating institutions in
each stratification cell are then summed, and divided into the
national male and female FTFT counts for all institutions in that
stratification cell. The resulting between-institution weights bring
the male and female counts for each stratification cell up to the
corresponding national counts for that stratification cell."

Methodology

Data Source:

self-enumerated questionnaires

Extent of Processing: ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of
disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major
statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to
these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection: